I am working on a quilt that is a gift for a friend, but mostly what I’m doing right now is swearing.
This quilt has had it’s share of problems. I’ll go into more detail later but for now let’s focus on my immediate stress: My machine is randomly puking black dust that seems like eyeliner flakes onto my WHITE WHITE WHITE quilt top as I free-motion quilt this beauty. I had my machine professionally serviced a year ago and am very, very good at cleaning it regularly with a paint-brush. I’m not sure what’s going on… and I can’t clean it more thoroughly because it has a computer brain inside I don’t want to funk with even if I could figure out how to access more of it’s insides.
one of many black smudges of sadness
So what do I do? I’ve decided I’m going to keep going and quilt the whole blanket – stopping frequently to take brush-out-the-dust breaks and to just give the machine a second to catch its breath (this is an intense quilting pattern of little, unattached clouds). After it’s all quilted I will stain-treat the stains, throw it in the wash, and pray and wish and hope. I can’t very well wash this with it only half quilted and I don’t want to put stain-treatment on the spots too early in fear of there being new damage caused by too-long exposure to the cleaning chemicals.
Barf barf. Wish me luck.
jenna brand 
How frustrating! Hopefully the stain treatment will work. Fingers crossed!